Plasma display apparatuses are widely used as display apparatuses installed in busy sections of a city for the general public, or installed at a home for a family to enjoy videos on a large screen. A plasma display panel (PDP) has better characteristics than a liquid crystal panel in the following points: responding at a faster speed, a wider viewing angle, easier to produce a larger screen, and higher display quality due to self-light-emitting.
In the PDP, display cells partitioned with barrier ribs are disposed on a board, and a phosphor layer covers the display cells. An ultraviolet ray generated by gas discharge excites the phosphor to emit light for color display.
The PDP is largely classified into an alternating current (AC) driving system and a direct current (DC) driving system, and into a surface discharge and an opposite discharge. A three-electrodes, AC driving and surface discharge PDP takes the mainstream of the PDP because of its high resolution, easiness of producing a large screen and easiness of fabrication. This PDP comprises the following elements:
a first substrate having a pair of display electrodes adjacent to each other in parallel; and
a second substrate having address electrodes arranged in a direction crossing the display electrodes, barrier ribs and a phosphor layer. This structure allows the phosphor layer to be rather thick, and is suitable for color display.
On the other hand, the PDP can be used as a large size display in various applications, so that its input signal terminal is desirably connectable to various external apparatuses such as a personal computer, a television receiver, and a video cassette recorder. Those apparatuses output their video signals including information signals.
A plasma display apparatus is thus equipped with various signal-input-terminals to receive as many external signals as possible. Users in the consumer market, however, scarcely use every signal-input terminal, but use one specific terminal for a particular external apparatus. Therefore, a number of the various signal-input terminals are useless for the users in the consumer market.
Plural types of plasma display apparatuses may be produced so that particular signal-input terminals responsive to users' applications can be provided. However, there will be a lot of models of one product because of the many applications discussed above, which lowers the productivity.
The present invention addresses the foregoing problem and aims to provide with ease a plasma display apparatus having a signal-input terminal responsive to a user's application.